Chatting online is a great way to stay in touch instantly and not have to wait for an email. Chatting was once very common to be used on Yahoo additions like Yahoo Messenger, but it grew to being done on sites like Facebook and other social networks that are mainly for social chatting.

Why is it so attractive to chat and use all of those smileys?

When people chat, they can talk to anybody in the world, and usually messages are super short, so it is a great way to communicate for some quick conversations with multiple people at once. 

The emoticons and smileys are what most people use if they don't want to type anything and just show their emotions, but usually they are used to show emotion after what they type in. Social chatting used to be just an ordinary thing online, but now it is what every teen does when they're online.